Want to find out what whales eat? There’s no need to cut them open, just wait until they relieve themselves.
One of the reasons given by the Japanese government for its “scientific” whaling programme is to learn more about the animals’ diet. Now Stacy DeRuiter at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and her team have developed a way of investigating diet by identifying mitochondrial DNA from the remains of the prey in a whale’s faeces.
The team has collected samples from several cetacean species and discovered, for example, that faeces from Blainville’s beaked whale contain DNA evidence of…
